Thea: A Danish cis guy dropped out of college to produce a five hour video on the history of gender identity research and treatment and how the anti trans movement is founded upon some fucked history going back until the 70s

This plant traps freshwater microplastics!

In a greenhouse outside Florence, Italian botanists have developed transgenic water lettuce, Pistia Magnifica. Its roots have been enhanced to bind and trap synthetic particles like polyethylene and polystyrene – the two most common types of microplastics.

Lab tests show that one square meter of Pistia Magnifica can remove up to 92% of microplastic particles from 100 liters of river water in less than an hour. The absorbed waste remains inside the plant, where it can later be harvested and safely burned.

I said this weeks ago and even then it was hardly a new idea

https://www.techspot.com/news/108730-ai-boom-more-overhyped-than-1990s-dot-com.html

art, rest

"my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you're not creating "dreaming periods" and says that they're meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you're able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they're natural and healthy and needed - things that should be embraced rather than feared"

The term Luddite has become shorthand for “dimwitted tech-hater” or “technophobe” and the word is usually used as an insult. But the original Luddites were the victims of a very effective smear campaign.

They did not oppose (and in some cases, destroy) automated looms out of some superstitious fear of new technology. They recognized that these new machines being introduced to the factories they worked at would make the work easier and faster.

But they also recognised that none of the extra revenue would be shared with the workers: it'd just go to enrich and empower the bosses. They knew that, since this new technology lowered the amount of labour required to do the work, many of them would lose their jobs.

The Luddites were a labour movement opposing the further concentration of the means of production in the hands of the owning class: Capitalists.

The government cracked down on them, sending 12,000 troops to brutalize them, arresting and sentencing some to death. It was not the first or last time that anti-union activity would kill people.

If the Luddites had won, maybe we'd be living in a better world. If the Luddites had won, maybe less people would dismiss the statement “AI is a threat to our way of life” by saying “you're just afraid of technology”.